Erotic Emails as the Modern Love Letter

The love letter has changed medium many times, and email is one of its newest homes. People write romantic and sexually explicit messages to partners, and some collections of such writing have been shared beyond that circle. Websites that gather erotic emails sent in by the public and publish them anonymously appeared in the early 2010s and illustrate how the form works.

Why email, and why share it

Sexting, the exchange of suggestive text and images by phone, became widespread in that period, and shorter messages tended to dominate. Reader-submission projects made room for longer pieces, the written descriptions and fantasies that lovers send each other. Organizers of such projects argued that these messages were the contemporary equivalent of the love letter, and some said that reading them created a voyeuristic thrill for senders and audience alike.

Building a submission stream

Projects of this kind often start with requests to friends and postings in community forums, and strangers begin finding them over time. Volumes vary widely, with quiet stretches followed by bursts of entries. Contributors tend to send messages as written, with no story about what prompted them, and often use anonymous email accounts, much like the throwaway addresses used to join adult websites.

Moderation and the question of taste

Any site built on submissions has to decide what to publish. A common rule is to refuse anything plainly illegal, such as content involving minors, and to lean toward inclusion beyond that line, on the grounds that readers react in very different ways. The same email might strike one person as arousing, another as funny and a third as awkward or off-putting.

Erotic writing in context

Collecting private erotic correspondence has precedents in published letters, anonymous erotica anthologies and confessional columns. In Canada, sexual content involving minors is prohibited outright by the Criminal Code and obscenity is also regulated, so platforms that publish user submissions face legal and ethical questions about consent, privacy and moderation. Research on online disinhibition suggests that anonymity often makes people more willing to write frankly. Whether any such site persists is uncertain, since small independent projects of this kind often fade.